Team

Team :

J-P Wigneron, PI of SMOS-IC, is Directeur de Recherche at INRAE, Bordeaux. He developed pioneer work in 2-parameter inversion of SM & VOD (Wigneron et al.,1995) at the basis on the SMOS retrieval and the L-MEB model, the forward model of the SMOS retrieval algorithm (Wigneron et al., 2007). Recently, he coordinated the development of the SMOS-IC product. His interests are in the application of remote sensing in analysing the water and carbon cycles at continental scales. He is Fellow IEEE, Associate Editor of Remote sensing of Environment, and member of the Scientific Committee of the French remote sensing data centre. H-index 75.
Xiaojun LI received the Ph.D. degree in environmental physics from the University of Bordeaux and is currently a Postdoctoral Researcher at INRAE Bordeaux (2022-present), working under the supervision of Jean-Pierre Wigneron on analyzing global carbon stock changes from disturbance using IB L-VOD. During his Ph.D., he developed the SMOS-IC version 2/SMAP-IB retrieval product and is currently responsible for evaluating and releasing the IB L-band SM and VOD products. His research interests include microwave soil moisture retrieval models, validation, and carbon cycle estimation. Xiaojun Li has published > 40 papers in top-tier journals such as NCC, RSE, JOH, etc. Xiaojun Li’s current work is funded by the RECCAP2 project, which is part of the ESA Climate Change Initiative (contract no. 4000123002/18/I-NB).
Xiangzhuo Liu received the  B.S. and M.S. degree  in  surveying  and  mapping  at  the  Xi’an   University   of   Science   and Technology  and  University  of  Electronic Science and  Technology of China in 2016 and  2019,  respectively. He is currently pursuing the Ph.D degree in environment physics at the University of Bordeaux/INRAE (2019.10-present). He is focused on retrieving VOD from the active microwave satellites, as the Advanced Scatterometer (ASCAT) and sentinel-1, etc. His research interests are VOD retrievals and the application of VOD in wildfire. Xiangzhuo Liu was sponsored by China Scholarship Council (201906070167).
Amen Al-Yaari received the B.Sc. honors degree in geophysics (graduated with excellent grade and first rank in the class) from Damascus University, Damascus, Syria, the M.Sc. degree in water resource engineering from Lund University, Lund, Sweden, and the Ph.D. degree in microwave remote sensing and hydrology from Sorbonne University (with honor), Paris, France. From 2015 to 2018, he was employed by the INRAe (Institut national de recherche pour l’agriculture, l’alimentation et l’environnement) as a research scientist, Bordeaux, France. In 2019, he joined Sorbonne University as Assistant Professor. He spent 1 month at the Middle East Technical University, Turkey as visiting scholar in 2019. His fields of interest are in the theory and techniques for microwave remote sensing of the Earth, with emphasis on hydrology, water resources management, and vegetation monitoring. His involvement in Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission started in 2012, with the validation of soil moisture data and development of the scientific algorithms and statistical methods to construct long and homogeneous time series of soil moisture. He has more than 50 papers in international peer-reviewed journals, and he has been a member of the Editorial Board of Geoscience since 2019.
Lei Fan is assistant professor in NUIST, China. He has worked in the SMOS-IC team (Bordeaux, France) from 2015 to 2019 as a postdoc, supervised by J-P Wigneron. He is interested in how the carbon cycle respond to variations in water availability at large scales, surrounding the role of vegetation water content in predicting plant carbon fluxes and growth. Recently he has worked on the application of SMOS-IC L-VOD to analyse aboveground carbon dynamics over tropics and boreal regions. He has published papers in Nat. Plants, Nat. Ecol. Evol, Nat. Commun, Sci. Adv and RSE. 
Mengjia Wang is a joint PhD student (2018-present, Beijing Normal University / INRAE), supervised by Jean-Pierre Wigneron in Bordeaux. Her interests are in VOD retrieval models, validation, and global carbon cycle estimation. She is currently focusing on VOD retrievals from AMSR-E/2 microwave observations. She has published papers in Remote Sensing and IGARSS. Mengjia WANG is sponsored by China Scholarship Council (201906040124).
Preethi Konkathi is a Doctoral Fellow at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (2019-present). She is currently at INRAE as part of the Indo-French Raman-Charpak fellowship program (CF ID: 134219R), working with Dr. Jean-Pierre Wigneron to calibrate radiative transfer model parameters for SMOS L-band passive microwave radiometer, with the aim of improving the estimation of global soil moisture and vegetation parameters.
Zanpin Xing received a B.S. and M.S. degree in Geographic Information System at the Southwest University and Northwest Institute of Eco-Environment and Resources–CAS, respectively. She is pursuing a Ph.D. degree in Geographic Information System at the Northwest Institute of Eco-Environment and Resources–CAS (2019.9-present) and is currently a joint Ph.D. student (2022-present, Northwest Institute of Eco-Environment and Resources–CAS / INRAE), supervised by Jean-Pierre Wigneron in Bordeaux. Her interests are in retrieving and evaluating microwave soil moisture and vegetation optical depth. Zanpin Xing was sponsored by China Scholarship Council (202204910459).
Frédéric Frappart
Christophe Moisy
Erwan Le Masson

Former students associated with the developement of SMOS-IC:

Roberto Fernandez-Moran is an assistant professor and researcher at the Image Processing Lab (IPL) at the University of Valencia. In collaboration with his team, he developed the first version of the SMOS-IC algorithm as the main focus of his Ph.D. thesis. His research interests center around modeling with physical and data-driven approaches using passive microwave remote sensing, with a particular focus on soil moisture and vegetation. Currently, he is actively involved in developing the algorithm for the land products as part of the upcoming CIMR mission.
Hongliang Ma received the B.S. degree in GIS from Huazhong Agriculture University in 2016, and the Ph.D. degree in cartography and geographic information engineering in LIESMARS, Wuhan University in 2022, respectively. He is currently working as PostDoc in INRAE, France. His research interests include soil moisture, vegetation, remote sensing (both microwave and optical).
Heather Lawrence,  University of Bordeaux/INRAE, PhD and Post doc, Soil L-MEB modelling 
Jennifer Grant,  Vrije Universiteit of Amsterdam/INRAE,PhD and Post doc, Forest L-MEB modelling
Kauzar Saleh,  University of Valencia/INRAE, PhD and Post doc, Grassland L-MEB modelling   
Thierry Pellarin, CNRM/INRAE, Post Doc, Pre-SMOS launch global scale evaluation
Mickael Parde, Sorbonne University, PhD

Main collaborations:

Arnaud Mialon, CESBIO, Toulouse, V105 Code and evaluation
Gabrielle De Lannoy, KU Leuven, Belgium, V105 evaluation
Ali Mahmoodi, V105 Code
Mike Schwank, Gamma Remote Sensing, Zurich, Switzerland, 2-Stream version of SMOS-IC